Since digital cameras took the lead in the photography market, many users have problems in managing the huge amount of images stored on their computers, storage devices and/or online collections of images. The occasionally captured images are aggregated in the various storage forms and occupy considerable storage volume, while the amount of stored images complicates and reduces the ability to find of a certain photo among the huge amount of photos. Therefore, the process of selection of images among the huge amount of stored images, for example for printing or for producing an album or specific collection of images for sharing online, may be complicated, wearying and time consuming.
There are known methods for ranking images, such as ranking according to optical quality of images or ranking according to popularity of the images.
Additionally, there are known methods for identifying and clustering related images, for example for creating batches of images related to a certain event or period of time.
The known methods for ranking and for clustering sets of images may facilitate the management of image collections.
Users can also design image products using digital images. Such image products include photo books, photo calendars, photo greeting cards, photo stationeries, photo mugs, photo T-shirts, and so on. A photo book or a photo calendar can include a plurality of pages each containing one or more images. Designing a photobook or a photo calendar can include many iterative steps such as selecting suitable images, distributing images to different pages, selecting a style, layouts, and backgrounds, selecting design elements such as image borders, adding text, and so on, which can be quite time consuming.
There is therefore a need for a system and method which may automatically or semi-automatically select and organize collections of images out of an aggregation of stored images. It is also desirable to provide easy-to-use methods to allow users to design and produce image products in a time efficient manner.